Category: cardiology retractions

Two Korean journals last month pulled papers by a prominent cardiologist at Yonsei University, Professor Hui-Nam Pak, with one retraction notice citing “issues related to scientific misconduct.”

Commenters on PubPeer had raised several concerns about data integrity, “mixed-up” data and “statistical nonsense” in “eNOS3 Genetic Polymorphism Is Related to Post-Ablation Early Recurrence of Atrial Fibrillation,” which was published in 2015 in Yonsei Medical Journal. The journal retracted the paper on January 19, noting that “we have recently become aware of a number of issues related to scientific misconduct.”

The article was coauthored by Patrick Ellinor, acting chief of cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and has been cited six times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

Researchers in China have lost a 2019 paper on sedation in people undergoing cardiac surgery after readers complained that the authors had failed to properly register the trial. 

The paper, “Effect of Perioperative Administration of Dexmedetomidine on Delirium After Cardiac Surgery in Elderly Patients: a Double-Blinded, Multi-Center, Randomized Study,” appeared in Clinical Interventions in Aging, a Dove Press title. 

Last year, a commenter on PubPeer flagged the article, which has been cited 26 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science: 

A group of heart researchers have lost two meeting abstracts after, according to one of the authors, companies said the data were proprietary and couldn’t be published. But it’s not clear the companies did so.

The studies appeared in the journal Heart Rhythm, the official journal of the Heart Rhythm Society, and were presented at the group’s 2021 annual meeting. 

The first author on both abstracts was Andrea Natale, a cardiac electrophysiologist at the Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Institute at St. David’s Medical Center in Austin. We wrote about Natale in 2016, after the researcher lost a paper in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology – again based on work he presented at the Heart Rhythm Society conference about which he raised concerns over industry meddling. (Natale disputes that he was the first author on the now-retracted posters, for reasons that aren’t clear to us.)

A former researcher at the Cleveland Clinic who studied cardiac genetics has lost three papers for what an institutional investigation concluded was “more likely than not” a case image falsification. 

As we reported last year, the work of Subha Sen, once a highly funded scientist at Cleveland Clinic but who left the institution in 2011, has come under scrutiny on PubPeer (note: a researcher with the same name, but at a different institution, also appears in these search results). With the latest papers, Sen now has nine seven retractions for issues including questions about the integrity of the data and the validity of the images. 

The three newest removals involve studies published in the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology between 2004 and 2009. The notices are very similar while referring to different images.

Here’s the statement for the 2005 article, “Inhibition of NF-κB induces regression of cardiac hypertrophy, independent of blood pressure control, in spontaneously hypertensive rats”: 

The authors of a 2019 meta-analysis in a JAMA journal on exercise and heart disease have retracted the paper after discovering that a quarter of the studies they’d used in the analysis did not belong. 

The retraction is the first for the journal, which had published some 2,800 articles before having to pull one, Frederick P. Rivara, the editor in chief, told Retraction Watch. One in 2,800, we should note, is quite close to the 4 in 10,000 rate of retraction in the overall literature.

The study, from a group at the Universities of Manchester and Brighton, in the United Kingdom, was titled “Accelerometer- and pedometer-based physical activity interventions among adults with cardiometabolic conditions: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” and appeared in JAMA Network Open. 

The authors, led by Alexander Hodkinson, looked at 36 randomized clinical trials and found that: 

The Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) today retracted a paper it published last year claiming that vaping was linked to heart attacks.

The paper, by Dharma Bhatta and Stanton Glantz of the University of California, San Francisco, has faced a barrage of criticism since its publication last June — and Glantz’s claims, in a blog post, that the study was “More evidence that e-cigs cause heart attacks.”

Brad Rodu, a professor at the University of Louisville who comments frequently on vaping, asked the journal to retract the study shortly after it was published. The study, he said, had failed to account for which happened first — heart attacks or vaping. The contretemps was the subject of a July 2019 story by USA Today: